Help with flooring quotes and material

[Lauren Daly]

I'm buying a 3/2 in a neighborhood right next to the hottest neighborhood in town. The house is truly a gem, we picked it up for $150k when the majority of houses around it sell upwards of $250k. This particular street is slightly lower for renovated homes because we back up to a rental townhome complex, I think fully renovated we could get $200k. We are planning on living in the house while we fix it up, then we want to rent it out when we can acquire our next property. The house has 5 different types of flooring and its 1,600 sq ft. We are going to open up the floor plan and I feel like a continuous flooring will make the living area feel spacious. Houses that are upgraded in our neighborhood command $150+/mo more in rent and sell $40k+ premium over non upgraded homes. We had 2 flooring contractors stop by during our option period and the quotes they gave us I am having trouble with because they are not apples to apples: Vendor 1) 1,300 sqft Engineered hardwood $10k Tile in the bathrooms, kitchen, breakfast nook, laundry (300 sq feet) $3k Tub tile surround and 1 shower $2k Total: $15,000 Vendor 2) Labor including demo and install $5k 1,300 sqft engineered hardwood $5k Tile surround & shower tile $2k Kitchen and bath floor tile $2k Now, I can do the math and see that one is cheaper in total. Option one is full service, option two in have a labor quote and a material quote that I pieced together. Is there something missing in the pieced together option that I should look for? After we got all these quotes, my fiancé talked to his friend who told us that he puts tile or vinyl plank in ALL of his rentals and that we were crazy to do engineered hardwood because we would run out of our extra boxes and end up replacing the whole thing in 3 years. In have quotes on Vinyl plank from vendor 1 for $2/sqft and from vendor 2 at $1.79/sqft. I hate the idea of tile, I think just because of it starts to look out of date it is HARD to replace it, plus it's hard and cold looking. I price out the wood look tile because it's a little less harsh, and it's about $1.99/sqft. Basically, my questions are: Am I getting insanely high quotes? And what material should I use for a "renovated" rental so that I can command the highest rent?